Biden vows to be ‘strongest labor president you’ve ever had’

Democratic nominee Joe Biden vowed to be the “strongest labor president you’ve ever had” in a virtual event Monday with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

“You can be sure you will be hearing that word ‘union’ plenty of times if I’m in the White House,” Biden said Monday. “If I have the honor of becoming your president, I’m going to be the strongest labor president you have ever had.”

Union workers, Biden said, “live by a code, an American code, it sounds corny but it’s real. Honor, duty, country, something bigger than yourself.”

The former vice president also took another shot at President Trump over reports he called Americans killed in World War I “losers,” calling the reported comment “downright un-American.”

“Calling those who have served, risked their lives, even gave their lives for our nation, ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ … these are heroes,” Biden said. As he did last week, Biden invoked his late eldest son Beau Biden, a veteran of the Iraq War.

“My Beau wasn’t a loser or a sucker,” he said.

Trump has strenuously denied making the remarks.

“I’m sorry if I’m coming close to losing my temper, but the simple truth is, if that’s how you talk about our veterans, you have no business being president of the United States of America, period,” Biden said Monday.

Biden gives an even more fiery excoriation of the Atlantic piece today:

“No president has ever talked about our servicemen and women in that way. Sorry if I’m coming close to losing my temper, but… if that’s how you talk about our veterans you have no business being president” pic.twitter.com/9MuwVcOHpN

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) September 7, 2020

Biden also hammered the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying the president left American workers behind.

“He was worried if he started talking about saving peoples’ lives, the stock market might fall,” Biden said. “Well we know it’s been great for his rich friends but it hasn’t been so great for the rest of us.”

“If I’m in the oval office, guess who’s gonna be there with me? Unions, labor, you,” Biden said.

“There used to be a basic bargain in this country: workers shared in the wealth their work helped create,” he later said during a question-and-answer period. The coronavirus pandemic, he added, has made clear that “we literally couldn’t survive” without front-line workers.

Biden also invoked his wife Jill’s experience as a teacher to argue specifically that “we better take care of the teachers.”

“We’re already short about 125,000 teachers and if we don’t do something about it, it’ll be close to a quarter-million teachers by 2023 and if that happens, I’ll be sleeping alone,” he quipped in closing.